Out Come the Knives
Well, that didn’t take long. Too quickly, after Henry Kissinger drew his last breath, the Left lined up to take potshots. It is so sadly typical.
How long has it been since anyone has heard WAPO shed tears about Bangladesh? The answer is you haven’t, not for a generation.
Who, in this country, ever gave a damn about Pakistan vs Bangladesh? The answer is: policy wonks.
What would the nation especially the Left, have done if Nixon and Kissinger engaged in ANY adventurism to help Bangladesh? Answer: They’d have burned our campi to the ground!
Who was responsible for us being in Viet Nam in force, much less initiating bombing? I’ll give you a hint: Their initials are LBJ and Robert McNamara.
Who was the closest to sending American tropps to Central America based on a half-cocked policy? Answer: It wasn’t Henry. It was Jimmy Carter. I was a part of the war games.
The WAPO article is most interesting in its use of terms like “tacit” and “indirect” and “greenlighting”. You imply his criminality and don;t have to back it up too strongly. Lame.
I am no fan of Henry Kissinger. He loved the limelight and thought himself one of the “beautiful people”. I thought he gladly let himself get rolled by the North Vietnamese negotiators. He was a supporter of the “limited war” concept. It’s a stupid concept for which he was not alone in his support. I thought Henry believed his press releases. His treatment as the Rabbi of Reason for the last half century was annoying at best.
BUT…!!!
To have been in government, even as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and to have conflict during your tenure, of any kind, marks you NOT as a criminal. In dealing with every conflict and hotspot listed by the peanut gallery this week, Kissinger did as asked. He acted in the interests of the United States as he saw those interests. Not as I saw them. Certainly not as the modern peanut gallery sees them. Few of them were alive at the time and their exposure to history is tainted by agenda.
The only Kissinger decision I can think of, as I write this, that I agreed with was his support for the bombing of enemy positions in Laos and Cambodia. They were ENEMY POSITIONS! And regardless of the label, we were at war with them. It wasn’t a tea party! But that is on the laundry list of “crimes” for which he seems to be held personally and solely responsible for, by his Johnny Come Lately critics.
You are not obligated to agree with a single decision he made or advised.
It’s one thing to say he made decisions you disagree with regarding people killing and raping and carrying out subtrefuge in this country or that. That doesn’t make him guilty of anything. The murderers and rapists and snakes themselves that DID it. Not Kissinger.
But, what the hell. Now that he’s dead, his corpse can be used by under-educated virtue-signallers to wipe their delicate feet. My question is, where have you been for the last 50 years? Answer: You (or your assignment editors) were wating for the day you could virtue signal, unchallenged. And damn, who’d have thought the bastard would live so long, right?